Berkeley Asia Business Conference: Glass Ceilings, Clint Eastwood, Nice People, And Vietnam Over China.

When I was in college, I would need to take a bus across a number of Midwestern states to get home for many of the breaks. I hated it with such a passion that upon graduation, I promised myself I would never again take a bus for more than an hour again and I lived up to that promise until last year when I absolutely had to take a 7.5 hour bus from Jinan to Qingdao because the train was out of commission due to a major accident. I hated that too, but at least I now know what people are talking about when they describe speakers so loud and scratchy that you really have no choice but to watch an endless stream of really bad kung-fu movies in Cantonese with subtitles.

Though I have pretty much blocked out virtually everything from my collegiate bus rides, I can still remember how, at least twice, in response to my telling people that my destination was Kalamazoo (my hometown), I was told how there were a lot of nice people there. I always thought statements like that pretty weird, but rather than challenge them by replying along the lines that Kalamazoo probably had no greater percentage of people than anywhere else, or mentioning that I knew plenty of jerks there, I would always just say, "yes" and try to return to my book.

I thought of my collegiate bus rides this weekend after being a panelist at Berkeley's Asia Business Conference 2010. I got to see my eldest daughter, who attends college in the area, and when I told her about the conference, she asked whether I had gotten paid. When I told her that I had not only not gotten paid, but that I had to fund my own trip there, she asked me why I had done this. I thought for a minute and told her it was for the people.

I love going to good conferences and I especially love being a panelist. Being a speaker is tough because it requires so much preparation. Being a panelist is relatively easy. You share the stage with a bunch of hugely qualified people and simply by being up there with them, at least some proportion of the audience believes you actually belong up there. The other great thing about being on a panel is that when someone else says something brilliant (as someone else almost invariably does), you just nod along as though it had been your idea all along.

But what's really great about conferences (at least for me) is being able to spend a whole day with people doing things similar to what I am doing or related. The learning can be incredible and it was.

Scott Matlock, Morgan Stanley's Chairman of Asia Mergers and Acquisitions, was the first person I heard speak at the conference and I have to confess I got there late for that. Grossly summarizing what I heard, he talked about how India is right now easier for mergers than China and how if you are just graduating from business school, China is THE place to be.

I then was on a panel with Jose Davila, Vice President of Field Human Resources at The Gap, Dave Sessions, Vice President of Global eCommerce at Walmart International, and Rand Han, Strategy Director for Bloodyamazing. I had previously communicated with Rand online so it was nice to meet him in person. Paul Tiffany, a Senior Lecturer at the Haas School of Business and a Director of Paul Tiffany & Associates, was our deft facilitator. The audience questions were excellent and I felt that the panel was very well balanced in that it had someone from a big chain store, someone doing eCommerce from a massive retailer, an owner of a Shanghai based boutique creative agency, and a lawyer. As would be expected at a top school like Haas, the questions were uniformly thoughtful.

After my panel concluded, I spoke with a Stanford MBA student who filled me in on the animation market in China, a recent Berkeley graduate who wanted to know if her liking China Law Blog meant she would like practicing law. I told her I had never been asked that question but answered it by pointing out that liking the law and liking the practice of law are very different. I also spoke with a consultant who helps tech companies go into China and India. We talked about some of the similar issues we face with tech companies and then we agreed that they are the toughest clients with whom to work because they so often tend to think that their methods necessarily work everywhere in the world. They are wrong.

I then attended an absolutely excellent panel discussion on technology, consisting of Dipchand Nishar, a LinkedIn Vice President, my friend Elliot Ng, the founder of VentureSprout and CNreviews, Tony C. Luh, Managing Director of DFJ DragonFund, and Ratnesh Sharma, Director of Global Product Management and Marketing for Citrix Systems. David Reimer formerly a Yahoo! VP and now an Executive in Residence at Haas School of Business, did the moderating. There were four big takeaways for me from this session:

--The Google v. China throw-down has been blown completely out of proportion. One of the panelists said that it has had absolutely no impact on other internet companies. Co-blogger Steve Dickinson told me that two Western reporters sought to interview him on how foreign companies were leaving China because of it. Steve told them that he is not aware of a single company leaving China because of it and that none of our clients have even once brought it up. It may be important politically but it is irrelevant for nearly all foreign businesses in China.

-- One of the panelists commented that places like China and India are no longer desperate for Western talent and so Westerners need to bring "more than an ability to quote Clint Eastwood."

-- One of the panelists commented that he thinks Vietnam is the best place in Asia right now for high tech. I spoke with him afterwords on why I tended to agree. His view is that it is simply easier to "get things done" in Vietnam than in China or India.

-- There is a shortage of project managers in virtually every country in the world.

I then had a fascinating conversation with a leadership coach, born in the United States, but whose parents are from India. This person was talking about how so many Indians and Chinese in the United States are of the view that they are being held back from job promotions because of their nationality, but this leadership coach believes it is because they don't fully understand how to operate in the United States. He told me that the people he works with expect to be promoted because of their high grades and their degrees, whereas that is not how it typically works in the United States. Reminded me of a conversation I recently had with a good friend of mine who is an executive at one of Korea's largest companies. This friend of mine, a Korean national, told me how frustrating it is for him that people in his company get promoted simply because they went to one of Korea's best colleges. There is an assumption that if they went to Seoul National, they must be good.

This leadership coach told me that his charges oftentimes never socialize with those not from their own country and that this can be harmful for them. I told him of how so many of the foreign law students at the University of Washington law school go to school there, but never really do much other than study and then return to their home countries, having learned a bit of law but nothing else. I said that American law firms generally do not want that sort of lawyer because they tend to be horrible at relating to American clients. In other words, being able to quote Clint Eastwood may not help you in Asia, but it probably will help you over here.

I then spent a long time talking with a value investor who was seeking China stock tips from me. I told him that I had (unfortunately) never invested in a China stock because I had seen to much of Chinese accounting to trust the numbers. But he kept pressing and I finally said that I liked the hotel company, Jinjiang International Holdings, and since it would be difficult to falsely account for the number of hotels, it would likely be a fairly conservative investment.

I also got to talk a bit with people I already knew before I went down there, including Sage Brennan (Organizer at TEDx Shanghai, Founder and Organizer at ChinaMeme, Founder at Hot Pot Press, Founder and Organizer at MobileMonday Shanghai, and vintner extraordinaire), Renee Hartmann, founder and CFO of eno, and Elliot Ng, founder of Venture Sprout.

All and all it was a most enjoyable trip. The Bay Area sure does have a lot of nice people....

Click here and here for a couple blog posts on the conference from Elle Zhang, who has me down as a "veteran marketer" at H&M (the clothing store), not as an attorney at H&M, the law firm. Oh well.

Would love to hear comments from others who attended.